So says Fr. Augustine Berthe in his biography of Garcia Moreno. I thought this made a pretty good companion to the previous two posts, so I’ll defer completion of the catechesis on the Sunday obligation till Monday – God willing!

I’m out of time, so here goes:

As a true Christian statesman, Garcia Moreno believed that God had sent His Son upon earth to govern nations as well as souls; and that in consequence the true Constitution of a people should have Jesus Christ for its Head, and the Evangelic Code for its formula. Under this first and great authority, the State is formed, sword in hand, to defend the liberty and action of the Church, and to provide for the order and material well-being of the nation, so that the children of the Church should enjoy that superabundance of all good things promised to those who seek first the Kingdom of God and His justice. This secondary organ of government should be united to the Church as the body is to the soul, and on their regular and combined operations depend the good order of State, the prosperity of society, and the true liberty of individuals.

……The revolution had so worked upon men’s minds during this last century,[written ca. 1878]that they have forgotten the first notions of social organization. They eliminate the main wheel of this organization, that is, the Church, the source of all truth and justice, and they make the people absolute sovereigns: so that society, having neither head nor heart, neither God nor Master, becomes prey of the Revolutionists, who divide the spoils. Thus the Revolution takes advantage of the credulity of the people under the specious names of liberty and independence. Even certain Catholics do not escape this Liberal infatuation. They boast of Constitutions based on the abominable doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, and on the subordination of the Church to the State, under the hypocritical formula of “a free Church in a free State.” In his Encyclicals and in the Syllabus, Blessed Pius IX condemned the favorite theses of the radicals, “that the Church should reconcile Herself with modern civilization,” and that “liberty of worship did not lead to indifferentism and immorality.” Garcia Moreno exclaimed on hearing some Catholics defend such opinions: “They do not understand that if the Syllabus remains a dead letter, society is at an end! If the Pope has put true social principles before us, it is because the world needs them if it is not to perish!”

……..Parliamentary absolutism is, in fact, the most formidable engine of despotism which the world has ever known; yet it is presented to the people as a type of truly Liberal Government. It is, in fact, the masterpiece of revolutionary duplicity.

———–End Quote———-

There is a great deal to unpack in the above. But know this, first and foremost: what Fr. Berthe’ wrote in 1878 was certainly the solid, orthodox Catholic belief of the time, espoused by popes and clearly in line with the constant Magisterium of the Church. The vast departures we have seen in many quarters of the Church since that time are just that: departures from the constant belief and practice of the Faith.

Going through the above: the Church is endowed by God with the first portion, She should always hold men’s first allegiance. Government that proposes “freedom of religion” in fact subordinates the Church to the State, which was exactly the goal of Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Voltaire, and all the other endarkenment theorists whose thinking is the sine qua non of virtually every government on this planet. All these men sought a way to subordinate religion, and especially the Catholic Church, to the power of the state. And as noted above, in so doing, they have created a society where indifferentism and immorality are rife as never before in the annals of Christendom, or what’s left of it. You can read Ferrara’s Liberty: The God that Failed for a deep analysis of this key point.

The final key point, and it is discussed in much more depth in the video below, is this: “Liberal” government, far from endowing freedom and empowerment on the people, actually reduces them to a form of serfdom never before seen in the history of the world. Never before has government, or any authority, had the audacity to take the majority of the produce of a man in the form of taxation. Even the lowest serfs were taxed by their liege lords at levels far below what most are taxed today in our “free republic.” And that is only the beginning. The Liberal government, because it claims to derive its power from the people, in the people’s name can assign itself powers orders of magnitude beyond what even the harshest medieval “despot” would have dared centuries ago. This is an odd phenomenon, but actually a stroke of psychological brilliance: if a government claims to derive its power from God and to be aloof from the “will of the people,” men will tend to guard very jealously their own prerogatives and circumscribe as tight limits on that government as they can. But in a government that claims to arise from the “sovereignty of the people,” that tendency to jealously guard against excesses from the government evaporates, because people have bought into the chimera that they have a say, or some form of control, over the limits of that government, and thus NSA wire taps and e-mail sifting, CCTV cameras on every street corner, and such a proliferation of federal laws that virtually every citizen of the country is an unindicted felon on numerous counts must be OK, because “we voted for this.” Or something.

Anyway, I am out of time, D is right, Charles Coulombe speaks in a very garbled way, but this is an excellent video that fleshes out many of the points above. It’s a long interview but I highly recommend you listen attentively:

FINAL REMINDER! SEE YOU TONIGHT, GOD WILLING! LET’S SEE A LOT OF NEW FACES! NO YOU WILL NOT BE CONFRONTED WITH NUDITY OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT!

Let’s see some more men come out! I get at least 1000 different readers a week from the Dallas Diocese and at least 30-40% of those have to be male. Everyone who comes out has a family and is very busy. We all are. It’s all a matter of priority.

So come on out! It’s a tremendous spiritual work of mercy! To all you men who have already come, thank you, God bless you, please keep it up!

I will be praying outside The Men’s Club, 2340 W. Northwest Hwy, Dallas, on FRIDAY AUG 21 @ 8:30p. I will actually be across the street in the parking lot of the US Post Office. This is directly across from the entrance to the inappropriately named “gentleman’s club.”

We’ve had some good turnout. I pray all of you are able to come back out this time.

The post office parking lot is well lit and set back some distance from the very busy roadway. It is public land so we cannot be harassed for being there. It’s really an ideal situation, we are basically impossible to miss by patrons leaving this sexually oriented business (SOB). Men over 18 only. All men are welcome. You don’t have to be a member of a particular parish. I will stay for at least an hour, maybe an hour and a half, depending on how many show up.

Just to be clear we have had no occasions of sin stemming from being adjacent to a strip club. We are out in public and have experienced no scandal at all to this point.

No protesting, just prayer. If we are approached by anyone associated with the SOB let one man interact with them while the rest provide prayer support.

This is a small way to push back against the culture of license, perversion, and death. Maybe it’s even a way to get that canonized “smell of the sheep” we hear so much about.

PS – I think everyone who has come out has enjoyed it. Every time is different.

Reader FM sent me a link to an article by the Catholic News Service – the official PR arm of the USCCB – on the ongoing normalization of relations between the United States and Cuber, which an earlier democrat called “that imprisoned island.” Incredibly, the article repeatedly tries to claim that the Cuban economy is so pitiful, and the Church is so repressed, not because of a vicious, repressive communist kleptocracy (the Castros are reputedly worth hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars), but because of the 55 year old US economic embargo.

The U.S. trade embargo against Cuba turns 55 in October, and its effects are clear in the dilapidated buildings, scant food supply of Cuban stores and infrastructure around the island…….[No nuance. No mention of communism. To the leftist who wrote this article, apparently completely ignorant of history, Cuba’s disastrous economic condition is due solely to the US economic boycott]

………”Certainly the conference (of bishops) in the United States, in conjunction with the Cuban bishops’ conference, for many years, has favored that kind of action, the lifting of the embargo,” Coll said. Such a move can bring about greater dialogue, commerce and contact with the Cuban people, their government, and foster human rights, freedom and democracy, just as it did in the similar landscape of Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall fell, he said. [This is a total rewrite of history. What “fostered human rights, freedom, and democracy” after the Berlin Wall fell? Why DID the wall fall? BECAUSE THE COMMUNIST STATES HAD ALREADY IMPLODED!!! Sheesh how blindly ideological do you have to be! The proper comparison is not the Eastern Europe, which had already thrown off the shackles of repression before relations were normalized, but with CHINA, and Vietnam fro that matter, where relations have been normalized with brutal authoritarian communist regimes, and that normalization has only helped further entrench those anti-Catholic governments in power. The exact same will happen in Cuba, and the USCCB is rooting for it.]

“The more they were able to rely on commerce and engage in dialogue with the West, the more possible it became for their own societies to be able to open up to human rights advances and eventually to a move toward democracy rather than pulling away from the West,” Coll said. [Once again, this is inverting history. The opening to the West prior to late 1989 was trivial and nascent, it did not involve full trade or completely normal relations until AFTER the Eastern European regimes had fallen or were in the process of imploding. The communist regime in Cuba shows no sign of doing either]

……Even St. John Paul II, an ardent opponent of communism, favored lifting the sanctions.

“Embargoes,” he said while addressing a group of young people during his visit to Cuba in 1998, “are always deplorable because they hurt the most needy.” [Then why don’t you address how the Cuban regime embargoes the vast amount of wealth and aid they receive from other nations into their own pockets and maintaining themselves in power? The Soviets poured billions into Cuba over 30 years but that did not help the populace at all, virtually all of it went to maintaining the regime in power. And mind you, while the US has had an embargo, Cuba has been free to trade with every European, South American, and North American nation. The US is not so all powerful as to have condemned Cuba to grinding poverty single-handedly. No, the communist regime has done that. The average Cuban today is must poorer than he was before the revolution, while the party elite live like kings.]

Any benefits that come from the historic thaw have the potential to affect more than just relations between Cuba and the U.S., Coll said.

“Cuba is a key that unlocks many other doors within Latin America,” said Coll. “You can think about the situation in Venezuela, for example … that’s related very much to what’s happening in Cuba.” [If you mean Venezuela is imitating Cuba’s disastrous descent into communism through leftist demagoguery, you’re absolutely right. I don’t see how suddenly pretending Cuba is a wonderful, enlightened place is going to do anything to help Venezuela.]

Success with Cuba can lead to success addressing issues such as religious freedom, violence and poverty in other neighboring nations. And that’s very much an interest of Pope Francis but it’s also not an interest that began with him, Coll said.

“Sometimes in the press, and elsewhere, there’s a desire to talk about how Francis is a revolutionary and so different from other popes, but on Cuba policy and on many other issues, including even economic policy, I would argue that Francis is very much in the tradition of Benedict XVI, John Paul II, going back to Leo XIII, so this is a chain … it really is a pretty unbroken chain,” Coll said.

Please. Leo XIII would have had nothing to do with Cuba so long as it remained communist and so nakedly anti-Catholic. JPII went to Cuba and condemned the regime to its face. Benedict XVI repeated the condemnation, though in a muted manner. Is that what we’ll see from Pope Francis? Or will he continue his theme of the people rising up to throw off the shackles of capitalist oppression?

Next post will examine just how socialist/communist regimes work, and how they must be opposed.

Has anyone else seen this? Reported by Sandro Magister, when in Paraguay, Pope Francis – on the thinnest of grounds – accused the government of having kidnapped citizens and held them forcibly. The government of Paraguay is conservative. This was after he had praised the leftist governments of Bolivia and Ecuador to the skies. Pope Francis appears to have assumed the worst about Paraguay being a “right wing dictatorship” and using ugly, inhumane methods against its citizens, but he got one small fact wrong: the citizens were actually kidnapped by a Marxist group that has received support from leftist elements in the Church, and which has been waging a low-level guerrilla war against the government for years. Oops:

But it can be added that Francis is also beginning to weigh the disadvantages of an excessively nonchalant communicative orality.

When for example he insists on the necessity of subjecting his own words to a correct “hermeneutic” – as he did in the press conference on the return flight to Rome from his latest journey – Francis may have had in mind the colossal gaffe into which he fell on July 11 in Asunción, speaking off-the-cuff to representatives of civil society and to the highest public authorities of Paraguay.

There, at a certain point, he said:

“Before ending, I’d like to make reference to two things. In doing this, as there are political authorities present here, including the President of the Republic, I wish to say this fraternally. Someone told me: ‘Look, Mr so-and-so was kidnapped by the Army, please do something to help!’. I do not know if this is true, or if it is not true, if it is right, or if it is not right, but one of the methods used by dictatorial ideologies of the last century, which I referred to earlier, was to separate the people, either by exile or imprisonment, or in the case of concentration camps, Nazis and Stalinists excluded them by death. For there to be a true culture of the people, a political culture, a culture of the common good, there must be quick and clear judicial proceedings. No other kind of strategy is required. Clear, concise judgments. That would help all of us. I do not know whether or not this exists here, and I say it with the greatest respect. I was told this as I came here, I was given this information here. I was asked to make a request about someone I do not know. I did not manage to grasp the surname of the person involved.” [One imagines that Pope Francis was probably here used as a puppet by the very left-wing group that did the kidnapping to embarrass and undermine the government]

The name that Francis had not “grasped” was that of Edelio Murinigo, an official abducted more than a year ago not by the regular army of Paraguay – as the pope had understood – but by a self-proclaimed “Ejército del pueblo paraguayo,” a Marxist-Leninist terrorist group active in the country since 2008.

And yet, in spite of his stated and emphasized ignorance in the case, Francis was not afraid to use the paltry and confused information gathered shortly beforehand to “fraternally” accuse the blameless president of Paraguay of nothing less than a crime compared to the worst misdeeds of the Nazis and Stalinists. [Indeed. A diplomatic gaffe of the highest order, and one that was completely unnecessary. Even had the accusation been true, bringing this subject to the fore at that setting would have been a grave mistake. The Pope who could not bring himself to condemn a blasphemous, politicized crucifix falsely accused another government of murderous acts. This despite the fact that leftist regimes (including the Nazis and Stalinists) have killed far more citizens than any ostensible “right wing” governments]

Another interesting article from Magister here. Consider it a proposition for weekend reading. This second article looks at the upcoming presidential election in Argentina and Francis’ clear alignment with the socialist-Peronist Kirchner camp. An excerpt from this later article:

But the true political “manifesto” of pope Bergoglio was the lengthy speech he gave in Santa Cruz, Bolivia to the anti-globalization “popular movements” of Latin America and the rest of the world, which he gathered around him for a second time less than a year after the previous meeting in Rome, in both cases with a seat in the front for the “cocalero” president of Bolivia, Evo Morales……[Saying, in effect, I’ve got your six, bro!]

Rereading these two speeches, it is striking how their “distinguishing mark” – to borrow the words of Marco Olivetti – is “populism, identification with a good ‘people,’” precisely what characterizes in Argentina the socialistic Peronism of the Kirchner era, during which the recipients of state funds tripled and now total 15.3 million, 36 percent of the population.

The “people” in which Pope Francis sees the avant-garde of a worldwide revolution against the transnational empire of money is the one that he himself describes as made up of “waste-collectors, recyclers, peddlers, seamstresses or tailors, artisans, fishermen, farmworkers, builders, miners.” To them belongs – he says – the future of humanity. Thanks to a process of their rise to power that “overflows the logical procedures of formal democracy.”

In the judgment of James V. Schall, former professor of political philosophy at Georgetown University in Washington, the speech in Santa Cruz is “pure Bergoglio,” with a political vision “closer to Joachim of Fiore than to Augustine of Hippo”. [Ouch. Given that Joachimite ideas were condemned by the Church (though Joachim himself was not) and thoroughly refuted by Aquinas, that’s not a positive comparison. Joachimites believed in a “new age” of the Holy Ghost in which the Church would fall away, or no longer be necessary, and Catholics, heretics, and pagans would unite in a new, worldly, invisible Church of “good works.” Doctrine was not important, even works were not so important as intent, the desire to “do good.” Sound familiar? Actually I’m narrowing Joachimite belief a bit for effect, but you get the picture]

But also from Cristina Kirchner’s party and from the Bergoglian circles there have come gestures of calculated support for these perspectives of the pope.

Last March, Argentine minster of culture Teresa Parodi organized in the immense and jam-packed Teatro Cervantes, in downtown Buenos Aires, a Foro Internacional por la Emancipación y la Igualdad that lined up the worldwide “stars” of the anti-capitalist opposition. [“International Forum for Emancipation and Equality]

And on the afternoon of March 13 there came to the microphone one after another the Brazilian Leonardo Boff, the liberation theologian who converted to the religion of mother earth, the Italian Gianni Vattimo, philosopher of “weak thought,” and the Argentine Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, archbishop chancellor of the pontifical academies of sciences and of social sciences and a key advisor of pope Bergoglio. [And whom we have seen veer very hard left under this pontificate, while behaving in an indecorous and unworthy manner, ascribing, without ANY justification, the most hateful motives to critics of Laudato Si and the embrace of abortionists and population control freaks by the Vatican]

To great applause and with a satisfied Sánchez Sorondo beside him, Vattimo made the case for a new communist and “papist” International, with Francis as its undisputed leader, the only one capable of leading a political, cultural, and religious revolution against the excessive power of money, in the “civil war” underway in the world that – he said – is disguised as a fight against terrorism but is in reality the class conflict of the 21st century against the multitude of all the opponents of capitalism. [Wow. Is this what Francis believes?]

Seeing is believing. Vattimo’s harangue, in Spanish, is between the 15 and 51-minute mark of the video of this session of the forum, followed by remarks from Sánchez Sorondo and Boff:

Just unbelievable. It truly is 1963 all over again, but the second time as farce. All these dried up old men trying to pretend they are the vanguard of something new. I don’t know why, I just have a feeling whatever it is they are trying to achieve is going to end in embarrassing failure. These guys are not the vibrant actors they were 30-40 years ago. They’re very tired old men, acting out a fantasy. Oh, incredible damage will be done, no doubt, but I have a growing suspicion that they simply won’t be able to get away with what they got away with in the late 60s – early 80s period.

The 2 people who have read these Flightline Friday posts for a while may remember that I have a “thing” for cockpit instrumentation. Especially night shots of same showing all the cool lights and displays. I don’t, say, get excited about a P-51 Mustang cockpit, because there’s not much to see. But anything from the mid-60s on, when cockpits started to get “modern”……….oh yeah.

Yes, I do need a better hobby.

Anyway there has been an upgrade program ongoing for the backbone of the US bomber fleet, the B-1B “Lancer” or Bone. Designed in the late 70s and produced in the mid-80s, its once advanced cockpit instrumentation has become decidedly antiquated. Actually, in many ways its still very functional, but the problem is, nobody builds small monochrome cathode ray tube screens anymore, and it has become impossible to maintain those currently in service as a result So all the old monochrome CRT displays are being replaced with flat-panel active-matrix liquid crystal displays under a program called the Integrated Battle Station (IBS). The first birds arrived at Dyess near Abilene in early 2014 and I believe most of the fleet has now been upgraded.

So, cockpit pics below. The first two are the B-1 as it was, and the remainder are the new displays (all pics can be clicked for higher res):

Night photo also taken at Dyess unupgraded B-1B. Note single multi-function CRT display for each pilot. All other instruments are analog, mostly very effective vertical tape indicators

Back end of B-1B; crew stations for Offensive and Defensive Systems Operators. All monochrome CRT displays. Large box in middle is the Integrated test system, an automatic fault-reporting device

Now for the upgrades:

B-1B at Dyess early 2014. Single CRT and several vertical tape instruments replaced with dual color LCD displays for each pilot

Same bird, another angle

Daytime. One knock on LCDs is that they are not as easy to see in daytime with the sun at certain angles

Back-end. Forward facing DSO sits on left, OSO on right. All new displays including a large screen replacing the old fault detection system. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen such detailed photos of the DSOs station before. Usually that stuff is hidden. If you look closely at the large “white” display on the left, you will see that it shows certain military transit routes, I would assume for a particular flight, overlaid on a map of Texas and Oklahoma

More detail of DSO station

And still more detail. So if you look at the top two large displays, the way it works is the one on the right shows a series of concentric rings indicating distance from the aircraft at center. Various threats are displayed at varying distances from the aircraft. On the left – turned off for now, because it’s highly classified – is a screen with just some lines on it? The way that works, when turned on, is that it will display various radar bands and the types of threats operating in those bands. So you might see long range search radar, AAA fire control radar, various SAM radars, etc. And from that list jammers and other countermeasures within the aircraft can be assigned to help beat back the threat

Pretty cool stuff. A couple pics below of how the B-52 looks today for comparison. When the 193 B-52Gs were retired, all the avionics were pulled out of them, including the then-20 year old CRT displays. I guess that’s why the B-52 has not been similarly upgraded, at least at the pilot’s stations, they still have a lot of those old leftover G model displays left.